Short abstract:

This panel explores what Anthropology can gain from using a New Materialities perspective and asks what an Anthro-Materiality might offer. It welcomes papers that explore how attending to the ways in which people are shaped by other materials might produce knowledge for sustainable futures.

Long abstract:

This panel intends to create critical discussion around how and if an Anthro-materiality (understood as the blending of Anthropology and a New Materialities perspective) supports a radical and useful rethinking of how to understand what it means to be human in the Age of the Anthropocene. It asks: could the production of knowledge that avoids reproducing the illusion of humanity's separation from their physicality (the materials or substances of the world and other entities that form and mobilise them), usefully help reconfigure dominant perspectives of the planet as a resource for human use both now and in the past? In this time, when global ecological, economic and political processes are shifting to accommodate geological changes, could an Anthro-material perspective help suture the intellectual distance between people and the landscape articulated by a human-exceptionalist perspective and foster sustainable practice? Or is this just academic fluff?